I'm so glad today (August 7, 2020) is over. Don't get me wrong, I love my daughter despite her teenage-ness, but I had to host her 14th bday luncheon on 1-day planning. I really don't have an excuse since I had two weeks to plan her birthday party during quarantine, but I started this blog and really got into it....Consequently, I completely forgot it was my daughter's 14th birthday a week after getting out of quarantine. Needless to say, I felt like a bad mommy when she reminded me 3 days ago that it was her birthday coming up and that she wanted to host a luncheon at home with a few of her close friends. My response was "uh sure... OMG it's your birthday, I totally forgot! OH NO!!!" If we were in the US it would have been easy. Trader Joe's and Stew Leonard's or Fairway (if it was still in business).. and I would have made amazing ready made pesto sauce and marinated chicken and would have been done in like 4 hours.
But in HK, it's not that simple. I had to run to 4 different grocery shops and bakeries to get most of the ingredients I needed, most not all.
Fortunately, my daughter is a lot more decisive than me and came up with the lunch menu in 5 minutes. Chicken mozzarella sandwich, pesto pasta and Cesar salad. All her favorites. I had just emulated my sister's delicious grilled chicken sandwich a few days ago which was not as nearly as good as my sister's phenomenal sandwich, but I would like to point the blame on the lack of ingredients sourcing in HK. For this reason, God granted the people of HK a helper. Without them, we would probably just eat crap everyday. When you are hosting a dinner party, you have to shop at a minimum of 2 if not 3 supermarkets to get all the ingredients you need. Every supermarket has its specialty ie Chinese local food, western expat food, or a blend of both.. There's no Costco and Trader Joe's where you can find amazing and affordable food with which you can entertain the army. Not to mention the lack of prepared food unless it's Chinese or mediocre western food.
Everyone would agree that Hong Kong is a super convenient city/country to live in. You can get to anywhere in the whole country within 1 hour. I live on one end of the country and the airport is on the other side, and I have gotten home in 40 min with no traffic from the airport. We can walk or drive to 5 beaches in 10 to 20 minutes, and be in the bustling business or shopping district in 10 minutes drive. It's a small country and incredibly convenient, but due to its size, there's a lack of resources. For example, you often need to resort to amazon for stuff you need when most of it is made in China which is a one hour drive from HK. Thus, due to the lack of demand, most things made in China gets exported to the US then it gets shipped via Amazon to HK. Talk about carbon print, ugh. I used to complain about how crazy this was, but it's all economics. Supply and demand. HK has about 2 percent population of the US so there is not enough supply-demand here although there are quite a few opportunities in Shenzhen for an amazing shopping experience which warrants a very long blog of its own.
I wanted to make everything from scratch except the bread. So here was my list of make from scratch items:
Cesar salad dressing
croutons
hibiscus mocktail
pesto sauce
I pretty much failed at most except the hibiscus mocktail since I had the hibiscus preserved in a jar, so I just needed to add sparkling water and lime.
I started the experiment at 8pm the night before the party. Way too late! The recipe for the pesto sauce that my daughter has been raving about from her friend's place was enthusiastically given by her friend's mom. But she also texted a photo of the jarred pesto sauce that she sometimes uses. It was nowhere to be found so I resorted to making it from scratch which I wanted to do anyway. But the 3 grocery stores I went to had NO packaged basils. However, the second grocery store had freshly potted basils. So I bought 5 pots hoping it will make enough pesto for 8 girls.
I followed the recipe but find that it's too lemony and tart. So I keep adding more stuff.. capers, olive oil, salt, pepper, parmesan cheese... In the end, I even had to resort to anchovies which my daughter begged me not to put in. I had to kill the tartness somehow. After about 1 hour or experimenting, it was 11 pm, and I was done. I wasn't happy with it, but I was done.
I also tried making the Cesar salad dressing, and it was an epic failure. I was so tired, I just threw in all the ingredients including the olive oil which was supposed to be for frying the bread for the croutons. This Allrecipe recipe sucks. In most recipes, they separate the ingredients if there are multiple dishes being prepared, but not this sucky Allrecipe! So I added way too much parmesan cheese and unnecessary olive oil, and tasted too weird. There was no fixing this pathetic dressing. Oh and the darn Dijon mustard! None of the 3 grocery stores had it. Only honey dijon mustard.... The Whole frickin' HK is out of Dijon mustard when I need it the most. Unfortunately, this kind of stuff happens all the time where the whole country runs out of random food items like romaine lettuce, Mexican shredded cheese, Buttermilk....then you have to avoid recipes that include them.. for a while. With that said, I have learned to improvise and say screw it, let me just make it myself and started shredding my own cheese, and making our own buttermilk. It would be a challenge to grow my own romaine lettuce so I resort to other salad mixes. I was grateful that I was able to find romaine lettuce in one of the stores. That would have kind of ruined the whole Cesar salad idea.
The croutons were another failure. The bread was too fresh and too dense and because of the humidity, and due to some type of failure in the process, it was soft and not crunchy at all. I imagined this homemade gorgeous holey (not holy), crunchy croutons that make all the difference in a Cesar salad.. but was this not meant to be. Despite my aspiration to make more croutons from the newly bought bread by my hubby the day of the party, I had lost steam at that point.
The bread... when my sister made it with yummy ciabatta bread that was crunchy yet chewy with medium density, it gave the sandwich the perfect finish. I went to 3 different grocery stores and the famed Eric Kayser bakery but did NOT have luck finding anything close to that perfect ciabatta bread. I kept visualizing it on the bread shelf at Trader Joes'.. but not in HK
What I neglected to mention in the beginning was that while I probably sound like a domestic minded let's cook everything from scratch type, I am not. I'd rather be writing a blog, working or playing with my 9 yo. But since I moved to HK, I have gotten more interested in preparing food from scratch. I have the time and help. And I want to live a healthy lifestyle to the best of my ability. When I read through some of the ingredients on the prepared food labels, it really freaks me out. Why do they need to add so much chemical when all you need is flour, sugar, and butter for some stuff? That's why I always appreciate Trader Joe's prepared food. Not too many incomprehensible chemicals. At least not on the labels anyway.
The luncheon turned out fine. The girls appreciated the homemade meal. I guess lots of love poured into those dishes made up for the lack of perfect taste I was aspiring for. What mattered the most was that the girls were together and that they had fun.
This artisanal perfect cake was not made by me... but by her brilliant baker friend Alyna, what a fantastic birthday it was for my 14 yo.
Hunting for ingredients is an adventure in HK. And I love adventures. You encounter a plethora of pleasant and serendipitous surprises along the way. And that's what makes HK so inconvenient at times, but so fun. An Architecture lesson which is a life lesson can be applied for my life in HK. It's about the process, not the result. That pesto sauce may not have been perfect for my nor my daughter's liking. But the adventure of finding the ingredients, and the love poured into it made all the difference.
nice vlog